The Forward Book of Poetry 2024 | 
I started a Poetry Foundation monthly readalong if anyone wants to join me over on Fable.
We‘re staring with the September 2024 issue as pictured above.
Let‘s all get cultured over on Fable or whatever. 🤷🏼♀️
pickI find these collections a way to discover new (to me) poetry.
Chair for [some] categories, Bernardine Evaristo: “.... we found ourselves drawn to poets who were moving poetry forwards in theme or form or both, who offered us emotional depth, imaginative fertility, re-readability and intellectual complexity, and, most importantly, who were writing fresh perspectives.” https://poetrysociety.org.uk/news/forward-prize-shortlists-announced-2/
The poem I hold in my hand is a single island,
a stone dropped in a river eleven centuries ago.
Shining, smoothed, altered by water.
It is also amorphous, a stringy mass of texts, pretexts, limbs, voices, heads, manuscripts, contested grounds, false lineages.
From Rowan Evans On Ēglond
The days are long, the borage flowers blue
and our back yard vibrating now with bees
and hoverflies. We know there should be more. Memory's sunlight swarms with little things and remembered moonlit darkness, too...
From Little Things by Jacob Polley
(Not borage flowers)
No, what I reference is the force of me, you, us a power of breath to fall and rise without issuing demands. Being here, colouring a lyric's final iteration: high notes fading against a cupola, the roof of a tin shed, the gambrel of a village hall, all the mercury bubbles unleashed.
From "Lyrical invention" by Nerys Williams
